“God moves in mysterious ways.”<\/p>\n
I would like to think that most people, even Republicans, wallow in sex scandals just for the sheer voyeuristic fun of destroying a politician’s career for no particular reason other than that one can.\u00a0\u00a0 For I otherwise don’t believe that there is a close connection between public and private virtue.\u00a0\u00a0 New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was an execrable father and husband but a transformative mayor, who understood as a gut matter some fundamental principles about the public realm and the responsibilities of citizens towards each other.\u00a0 Not all our Founding Fathers were paragons of fidelity.\u00a0 Bill Clinton’s ability to nudge the Democratic agenda towards a modest repudiation of the welfare state was untouched by his irrelevant womanizing.\u00a0 Sanford’s initial stance on the stimulus package was a valuable one,\u00a0\u00a0and it is amusing to see the media left <\/a>seize on his marital transgressions to discredit it yet again.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A politician’s sex life has only one public relevance: its unavoidable function as a role model.\u00a0 I confess that I would be unwilling to vote for a politician who acted as a serial impregnator of women without marrying any of them, not because I believed that such behavior told me anything about his public character , but because he would be further normalizing a civilization-destroying behavior.\u00a0 There is a big difference between having an extramarital affair and never bothering to marry the mother(s) of your children in the first place–the one at least obeys a crucial norm, however imperfectly, the other destroys it completely.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sanford did make his private life a matter of public concern, however, by his self-involved failure to secure the chain of command during his disappearance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “God moves in mysterious ways.” I would like to think that most people, even Republicans, wallow in sex scandals just for the sheer voyeuristic fun of destroying a politician’s career for no particular reason other than that one can.\u00a0\u00a0 For … Continue reading